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The ​Dell Linux website has information about the actual manufacturer of each PowerEdge RAID Controllers (PERC) HardwareRaid cards. The Dell PERC 5i in thorax is a LSI MegaRAID SAS 8480e and other servers have PERC 6i (LSI MegaRaid 1078) which support SAS or SATA drives up to 2TiB. Newer PERCs models such as the H800 support 3+ TiB drives.

The MegaRaid PERC cards have many features including ​(PDF) Patrol Read, which regularly reads every block of each disk to catch errors that a RAID5 consistency check would miss.

MegaCli tool

The ​PERC 5i PDF Cheat Sheet is extremely helpful. The MegaCli tool's documentation is poor and user interface is even worse, especially for simple tasks. Arguments are not case sensitive so you may mix case to make commands slightly readable. You also must specify which Adapter for every command with -a0 or -aALL.

The ​LSI website seems to change every time I look, but currently you can get the tool by ​searching for "MegaCli Linux". The latest version right now is MegaRAID SAS MegaCLI - Linux, Version 8.01.06 and comes as RPMs inside a zip inside another zip:

Bootable Virtual Disk

From Ron:

- Press ctrl-r as system boots and enter perc 6i setup utility.
- Hit ctrl-n to get to the ctrl management screen, and then select "bootable VD" in bottom left of screen.
- I checked "enable controller bios", but not sure if it was really necessary.